Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 351 pp. $29.95.

With a careful exarnination of archival sources from representative Cheryl Lynn Greenberg details the between African Americans and Jewish during the twentieth century. This relationship been "not merely a subject for quiet study" (1), but one that "even within the scholarly community . . . has been a battlefield" (2). and rhetorical formulas concerning how each behaves and perceives the other are well ed, and there is no need to elaborate Greenberg makes short work of the vexed questions of whether Jews constitute an ethnic or a group, humorously (but cogently) declaring, "some of both" (5), and of what constitutes a race, "the criteria for defining who is black . . . have changed many times in this country" (5). Greenberg avoids polemic, instead qualifying the idea of a "natural alliance" (2) between these long oppressed peoples by examining a history of the 20"1-century experiences of each group as they responded to their respective places in American society. However, potential readers may be misled by the book's title: it only indirectly analyzes popular attitudes or actions.

Greenberg focuses on "liberal political organizations" as indices for group interests. She identifies advocacy agencies and protest organizations, describes their composition, and recounts policies regarding responses to anti-semitism and...